| Recession tipping IT toward open source? |
Mar. 25, 2009
The recession has sharply accelerated interest in open source technologies among enterprise IT buyers, says an eWEEK story. Pointing to recent remarks made by Alfresco GM Matt Asay, the story says that cost pressures and the growing maturity of open-source software has led to a pronounced shift in recent months.
Only two and a half years ago, potential buyers of Alfresco's Linux-ready web content management tools were telling Asay that open source software was "too risky" for them, according to the eWEEK story by Chris Preimesberger, "Why Recession Is Causing Enterprises to Rethink Open-Source Strategy." A week ago, the same buyer changed his mind, telling Asay that in the current economic climate, he could lose his job buying expensive proprietary software, according to the story. "You guys are now in the drivers' seats; we need to buy open source," the buyer was said to have told Asay.
No one ever got fired for picking open source?
According to Asay, such reversals in fortune are not uncommon these days at Alfresco, says the story, which quoted Asay's opening remarks at this week's sixth annual Open Source Business Conference at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. Asay was also quoted as saying that executives at other vendors of open source software, including Pentaho, Jaspersoft, and Akamai, have been relating similar stories. "I'm hearing the same things: Open source is now the less-risky investment," Asay is quoted as saying. "This is new reality No. 1."
The story, which notes that Novell, Mozilla, Red Hat, Canonical, Ingres, and other open-source software companies appear to be doing relatively well in the last year, appears to align with the findings of a recent study by IDC commissioned by Novell. The study found that two-thirds of the 300 "IT executives" surveyed were either "actively evaluating" or "accelerating adoption" of Linux on the desktop, and about 72 percent responded likewise for servers.
Availability
The full eWEEK story by Chris Preimesberger, "Why Recession Is Causing Enterprises to Rethink Open-Source Strategy," should be available here.
-- Eric Brown
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